Continental Philosophy Review (2023) 56:177–184

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-022-09597-6

REVIEW ARTICLE

Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images: A

Phenomenology of Visual Media, trans. Nils F. Schott. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Xiv + 391 pp.

Thomas Pfau1

Accepted: 30 November 2022 / Published online: 25 January 2023

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022

Abstract
This review of Emmanuel Alloa’s Looking through Images considers the author’s
arguments with regard to their philosophical bearings and their significance for
modern visual aesthetics. Particular attention is paid to the way that the traditions
of Platonic and Aristotelian Realism are linked to modern phenomenological theory
(Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Marion). Alloa’s elegant and lucid exploration of the im-
age as a form of non-propositional cognition makes this monograph a landmark
document in contemporary visual studies and aesthetic theory.

Keywords Image theory · Phenomenology · Media theory · Plato · Aristotle ·

Husserl

Considering the sharply divergent styles and concerns of Anglo-American and Euro-
pean philosophy, respectively, it is perhaps not surprising, though still regrettable,
that it should have taken ten years for this remarkable book to be translated into
English. Making at last its appearance a decade after its original publication in Ger-
man (Das durchscheinende Bild: Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie, 2011),
Emmanuel Alloa’s Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media –
ably rendered into English by Nils F. Schott – should help establish its author on this
side of the Atlantic as a leading thinker on the interconnected fields of phenomenol-
ogy, visual studies, as well as image-, icon-, and media theory. English translations
of a number of Alloa’s essays had prepared the ground for this reception, as did his
excellent introduction to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Resistance to the Sensible
World, 2017).

Thomas Pfau
pfau@duke.edu

1
Duke University, Durham, NC, United States

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178 T. Pfau

Not quite retained in the English title, the German original’s characterization of the
image as durchscheinend – “diaphanous” or “translucent” (though not “transparent”)
– hints at the unique ontological standing, at once intuitive and ineffable, that sets
images apart from garden-variety objects and signs alike. At the same time, Alloa’s
choice of the gerund form (durchscheinend) reminds us that “perceptual media are
far from being transparent windowpanes but have a texture” and, we might add, an
agency “of their own” (11). What unfolds in the book’s five substantial and impres-
sively detailed chapters is a comprehensive philosophy of the image that consistently
resists the latter’s entrapment within the binarism of transparency and opacity (10; s.
a. Ch. 3) and, consequently, its assimilation to an economy of signs or objects. The
central premise for Alloa’s undertaking has to be that “phenomenal and propositional
structures are not subject to the same laws and cannot be reduced one to the other”
(9), just as visualization is not fungible with object perception but, on this account,
emerges as the latter’s founding condition. As Alloa shows, our encounter with
images reveals visualization to be inherently transformative, a “perceptual alloiosis”
that involves the beholder in a process of “self-increase and self-improvement” as he/
she “actualizes intrinsic capacities” (69) in the phenomenon itself. We recall Gadam-
er’s pithy formulation that the image brings about “an increase in being” (Zuwachs
an Sein).
Alloa’s principal objective is to recast phenomenology as a fully articulated phi-
losophy of media, a “diaphenomenology” that “not only accounts for the co-con-
stitutive role of media through which something can come to appear at all but also
brings out the fundamentally heteronomous character of mediality” (10/12). To make
good on this claim, the book opens with meticulously structured and impressively
detailed analyses of Plato and Aristotle (Chaps. 1 and 2). From there, Alloa moves
more briskly to offer a selective account of early modern philosophy “as a history
of forgetting the medium of appearances” (Chap. 3), followed by a discussion of
images and “image-consciousness” (Bildbewußtsein) in the phenomenology of Hus-
serl, Sartre, Fink, and Merleau-Ponty (Chap. 4). It concludes with Alloa unfolding
the outlines of a substantially modified, “medial” phenomenology (Chap. 5). Alert
throughout to the indiscernibility of medium and content, Looking through Images
exfoliates the many implications underlying its central thesis: that, if only philoso-
phy is prepared to think with rather than presume on them, images teach us that all
appearance is medially conditioned; that, furthermore, “every mark and every dif-
ference counts as a matter of principle” and, consequently, that a study of the image
ought to unfold as an inquiry into “its symptoms” rather than quarantining it as “a
closed ontological class” (12).
Focused on Plato’s Sophist, the book’s opening chapter brilliantly outlines the
challenge that thinking about the image poses to classical metaphysics, while also
reminding us of the metaphysical underpinnings of modern phenomenology and
media theory. To trace “the bottleneck between Sophist and Eleatic doctrines” is to
confront the central dilemma, namely, that “if being and not-being make opposing
but nonetheless equivalent claims to truth, there is no place left for deception and
no concept for images” (15). Suspended between being and non-being, the image
is “well and truly atopon, … [something] that cannot be unambiguously located”
(17). It is this quest for mediating between hermetically sealed, Parmenidean Being

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Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of… 179

and outright non-being that prompts Theatetus to develop a concept of resemblance

(mimēsis) and participation (methexis). To be sure, philosophers and theologians as
diverse as Paul Natorp, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Hans Urs von Balthasar have long
recognized how, in the Parmenides and Sophist, Plato unfolds a concept of difference
that is no longer reducible to categorical otherness: “While the image is similar to
what is, it is necessarily already other (heteron) without already being the other of
the depicted (to heteron) and thereby merely not being.” Hence, Plato “declare[s]
the negativity of the image to be no longer an external but an internal difference of
being.” In other words, “the image is strictly speaking not what it presents, yet in
relation to other things (pros alla), an image is always already an image of some-
thing” (19–21; s.a. 70–71).
Far more than in Republic (Bks. 7 and 10), it is the Sophist that furnishes Alloa
with the crucial point of departure for his project of a medial phenomenology, a
veritable Urtext of image theory wherein Plato – in conscious opposition to Eleatic
monism and the constructivism of the Sophists – makes his case for an indelible link
between being and appearance, and by extension that between phenomenality and
mediality: “the Sophist marks the point at which the question of being can no longer
be asked beyond the space of phenomenality” (39). However, as Alloa also shows, no
sooner has the image’s unique ontological constitution been glimpsed than it is being
obscured. Thus, Aristotle’s doctrine of categories works to “deontologize” the Pla-
tonic understanding of the image as inherently bound up with the being of which it is
a likeness even as it is nowise reducible to that being. Yet to introduce the category of
relation as the central criterion for understanding the image is to abandon the Platonic
thesis (later developed by the Byzantine iconodules) of a consubstantiality between
what appears and what is (thereby) made manifest. By contrast, Aristotle frames the
question in fundamentally different ways by asking.

what does it mean when images are not similar per se, when they are not ‘what
has been made to resemble another,’ when it is instead a third [a semiotic con-
vention] that institutes a relationship of similarity between the image and the
depicted? It means nothing short of this: the question of the image recedes in
favor of the question of what it is an image of, who it is an image of, in favor,
that is, of the question of how it depicts and why it counts as a depiction for
someone (23–24).

The result, Alloa argues, is a process of reification whereby the image ceases to be
“an immanent ground of being” and, instead, is appraised in strictly functional and
contingent manner based “on an externally attributed relationship.” It is this termino-
logical and conceptual shift from Plato’s pros alla to Aristotle’s pros tì that sets the
stage for philosophy’s eventual forgetting, if not positively obscuring, “the funda-
mentally heteronomous character of mediality” (10). Yet Aristotle himself does not
succumb to that temptation. In fact, emerging as one of the heroes of Alloa’s narra-
tive, Aristotle in his own way successfully refocuses the image through his category
of “relation,” which allows him to highlight both the medial character of the image
and its temporal dimension. For while they are construed as “dependent phenomena
because they presuppose a preceding perception now being actualized” (29), images

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180 T. Pfau

exceed that brief by not only reclaiming but positively transforming the intensity
and presence of past perceptual experience: “That an image is always the image of
something not present does not mean that the nonpresent is no longer or not yet
present. Phantasmata can be reproductive or anticipatory, but they do not have to be
either” (30). Hence, the binary matrix of being and semblance (Sein und Schein) is
inadequate when we confront the central question about the image, first posed in the
Republic: “does [painting] imitate that which is as it is, or does it imitate that which
appears as it appears? Is it an imitation of appearances or of truth?” (X, 598b).
In the event, Alloa argues, it is Aristotle rather than the Eleatic philosopher in
Plato’s Sophist who offers “the first articulation of the structure of intentionality” that
defines images: “sight is the sight of something, not of that of which it is the sight”
(Metaph. 5.15 1021b1). Following Aristotle’s prompt, Husserl will later distinguish
between “apprehension contents” (Auffassungsinhalte) such as color and “perceptual
contents” (Wahrnehmungsinhalte). Since the latter involves a judgment, rather than
the raw experience of phenomenality as such, it follows that “an actual process of
perception cannot have itself as its object without ceasing to be a perception” (44).
Alloa’s crisp formulation prepares for his in-depth account of “Aristotle’s proto-phe-
nomenology” in the book’s second chapter, an argument unfolded with great ana-
lytical and philological precision. An example of Alloa’s scrupulous handling of key
concepts involves Aristotle’s use of krinein and its unhelpful, intellectualization by
Scholastic Aristotle translators and commentators. Thus, while visualization involves
a “discerning” and “discriminating” of the visible qua appearance, the distinction
between “apprehension” and “perception” ends up being elided by Moerbeke’s
abstract rendering of krinein as iudicare. To be sure, “truth or falsehood cannot be
measured by the immediacy of appearance.” Yet when properly understood as the
correlate of an experience, rather than a quasi-propositional judgment, the aesthetic
(what Husserl later terms the “pre-predicative”) turns out to be by its very nature
“open toward the logos but not congruent with it” (56).
In tracing questions of image, mediality, specularity, and phenomenality across the
centuries, Alloa rewrites the history of classical and modern Western philosophy as
one of forgetting, or sidestepping, the way that phenomenality and its experience is
circumscribed by mediality: “For something different to arise as the always-identical
and for this other to come in as something else, as something different from the identi-
cal in the first place, there must be a constitutive distance, an inherent interspatiality
[Zwischenräumlichkeit] that makes appearing possible and yet opens up at all only
in this appearing” (65). “Mediality” is Alloa’s preferred trope for this intermediate
“site of aesthesis,” this “nameless something,” this uncharted zone between intuitive
apprehension and object perception.
In a key passage that showcases the decisive role Aristotle plays in Alloa’s argu-
ment, he scrutinizes the claim that “Whatever is visible is colour and colour is what
lies upon [epí] what is in itself visible [kath’autò horatou]. Noting how "in itself
here means not that visibility is involved in the definition of what thus underlies
colour, but that that substratum contains in itself [en eautō] the cause of visibility”
(De Anima 2.17.418a28-30), Alloa proceeds as follows:
Insofar as the objects of the world always have sensible properties of their own
(a colored surface, for example), they are visible objects and carry in themselves the

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Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of… 181

cause of their appearing. And yet their own constitutive visibility is only coconstitu-
tive. Insofar as every visible object depends on appearing to someone as something
visible, it must step out of itself and show itself to another, animate being. Color,
as the object’s own visibility, must set the medium into motion, and the medium
thereby receives the visibility it gives rise to in the perceiver as something alien.
The medium thus already belongs to the visible but it does not have its visibility in
itself (kath’autò) but by means of another. This names the fundamental paradox of
mediality: what is independently visible is visible independently only on the condi-
tion that it dispossesses itself in the coconstitutive force of the alien medium; the
medium, inversely, only unfolds its own mediating function once it accepts being
defined heteronomously by something else. What shows itself “always shows itself
in passing through something else, ‘through’ (diá) an other. Every appearing – and
this is the thesis whose radicalness and scope we have yet to fathom – is always an
appearing-with or an appearing-through. The fact that the radicalness of the claim
went unnoticed is due primarily to Aristotle’s using an expression that made it seem
self-evident. He fills the conceptual empty spot, which he has so carefully prepared
and delimited, with a peculiar, newly minted concept: that through which and in
which that which appears does appear is “what shines through,“ the “diaphanous”
(diaphanēs). (77)
To retrieve this medial dimension intrinsic to the experience of phenomena means,
first and foremost, to salvage the concept of the image from being associated with
the persistent and counterproductive binarism of active/passive and Western philos-
ophy’s habitual characterization of visual experience in terms of of “immediacy”
(Unmittelbarkeit). Consisting of a series of compact readings, Chap. 3 thus traces
the “reception history of the diaphanous” as a “ghost story” marked by long periods
and diverse styles of conceptual obfuscation and outright forgetting. Yet the elision
is never complete but, as Alloa shows, is intermittently punctured by the unexpected
(and typically unwelcome) resurgence of the diaphanous as it “flares up in eerie
hauntings of the history of knowledge” (105).
Overall, Alloa’s post-Heideggerian history of Western epistemology as case of
Medienvergessenheit (“forgetting media”) rather than Seinsvergessenheit comes
in two versions: “the transparency paradigm and the opacity paradigm.” Roughly
speaking, this history extends from Alberti via Kepler and Descartes to Berkeley.
Finally, during the first half of the twentieth century, the first of these paradigms
culminates in the image’s forced assimilation to a general semiotics aimed at the total
“semanticization of the image,” such as in Panofsky’s “Iconology.” Conversely, the
opacity paradigm treats images as derivatives of perception, which results in their
naturalistic “reduction” to “objecthood” by “insist[ing] on the thing before it becomes
an image” (106). Ultimately, though, Alloa concedes that the antinomy of transpar-
ency and opacity, while heuristically useful, remains itself “superficial” (155). For
regardless of whether the image ends up being absorbed into an order of things or of
signs (Aquinas’s doctrina rerum or doctrina signorum), it remains “caught in a pro-
cess of objectivization that leads to a disjunction between meaning or sense and the
material process by which things make their appearance” (155).
Chapter 4 finds Alloa tracking the elusive status of the image in modern phenom-
enology, a discourse that from the outset suspends the concern of traditional, “repre-

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sentationalist” philosophies anxious “to explain how our representations match with
the true nature of the things of the external world” (159). And yet, no sooner has Hus-
serl’s expanded concept of “intuition” (Anschauung) raised the possibility of thinking
about the image in ways other than reducing it to a derivative of a sign or an object,
respectively, than his nomenclature of “depiction” (Abbildung) and “pictorialization”
(Verbildlichung) forecloses on the image’s mediality. Thus he characterizes the onto-
logical interspace between mind and world as but a “transitional unity” (Durchgang-
seinheit), no less “surrogative” than any garden-variety “sign” (Zeichen). Here, as
in his subsequent discussion of Sartre, Fink, and Derrida, Alloa makes a convincing
case for understanding “phenomenality [as] neither purely immanent to conscious-
ness nor entirely transcendent or inaccessible to it.” In fact, there is always “a tension
between "the object of perception itself and its appearances.” Hence, rather against
the grain of his philosophical objectives, Husserl finds himself wrestling with this
“tension-filled concept of appearances, which can be put down neither to an integral
being-such nor to a sheer-being other” (167).
Regrettably, Alloa does not offer a detailed engagement with Husserl’s 1904/05
Göttingen lectures on Phantasy and Image-Consciousness and the tantalizing, albeit
still fragmentary, contours of an aesthetic theory found there. Yet while brisk and
compressed, Alloa’s consideration of twentieth-century phenomenology’s contribu-
tion to image theory are unfailingly acute and deeply informed. Of particular value to
his broader argument is Eugen Fink’s theory of the image’s “relucence” or “shining
back,” namely, that in images – and only there – we find “that the watermark of that
which produced them remains recognizable in a particular way: the backside of the
medium, as it were, comes through the concealment” (196). A certain “opacity” or
“shadowing” (Verschattung), Fink was to argue (in a 1957 lecture on Husserl that
would have significant influence on Merleau-Ponty and Derrida), is an integral fea-
ture not only of the image as such but of any phenomenological study committed to
articulating its ontological status.
Chapter 5, arguably the most original in the book, finds Alloa unfold his own
account of “Media Phenomenology.” He begins by parsing what he takes to be sig-
nificant limitations in Husserl’s phenomenology, in particular the “struggle with its
own hidden teleology, which unravels the unfolding phenomenon from its ideal end
or from an adequately focused center” (210). Alloa’s critique of Husserl’s metaphys-
ics of “essence” (cf. 222 ff.), which he considers untenable, bears some resemblance
to Claude Romano’s intriguing discussion of “Essentialism without Essences” (At
the Heart of Reason, Ch. 10). Yet Alloa’s proposed modification of transcendental
phenomenology into a medial phenomenology that, he insists, “must … begin else-
where than with the constituted noema” (210) comes closer to an outright break with
the tradition inaugurated by Husserl. Following on the heels of a brisk consideration
of a number of contemporary accounts (Wilhelm Flusser, Lambert Wiesing, Nelson
Goodman) – all of them wanting for one reason or another – Alloa’s “Outline of a
New Approach in Image Theory” (238 − 91) identifies ten criteria, or “symptoms of
the iconic.” What distinguishes them is that each one no longer purports to name a
formal trait of the image but, instead, a qualitative “intensity.” In toto, these concepts
(“ellipsis, synopticity, framing, presentativity, figurality, deixis, ostensivity, case sen-
sitivity, the chiasm of gazes, and seeing-with” (242) furnish a conceptual grammar of

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Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of… 183

sorts by which to account for the experience of the image as a diaphanous phenom-
enon, or the book’s eponymous “Looking through Images.”
Even a book as impressively learned and cogently argued, however, cannot (and,
to Alloa’s credit, does not purport to) exhaust its subject. Among the questions that his
account raises, the one recurring with particular insistence concerns the relationship
between mediality and metaphysics. If the various “intensities” of the image-medium
and its effect on the beholder were strictly contingent functions of its material scaf-
folding, there would be no warrant for image theories of any kind, including Alloa’s
medial phenomenology. Yet in positioning his medial phenomenology as a bulwark
against the specter of nominalism, Alloa ends up reinvesting the iconic with an
ontological valence of its own – a development to be considered neither regrettable
nor culpable but, rather, inevitable. However inadvertently, that is, Alloa’s account
of mediality appears suffused with metaphysical implications that resonate rather
strongly with earlier accounts, such as Gadamer’s claim for an “ontological valence
of the image” (Seinsvalenz des Bildes), von Balthasar’s incisive account of the dis-
tinctive “truth of images” (die Wahrheit der Bilder) in his Theo-Logic (vol. 1); and
a phenomenology of the icon marked by an indelible “excess” as set forth by Jean-
Luc Marion, whose work, most surprisingly, receives no mention by Alloa. All three
projects (and others could be added) comport with Alloa’s conclusion that “Images
always already convey something more and something else than what they are them-
selves; this, precisely, is what makes them media” (294).
Far from a post-metaphysical event, looking at images – experiencing the distinctly
medial constitution of the visible – also alerts us to a quality of consciousness, call
it Gelassenheit, an openness to the numinous absent which the image qua medium
could never come into effective focus at all: “[Media] endow what they allow to
become visible … with an unavoidable turn of their own” so long as we are prepared
to “let ourselves be drawn into a generation of sense that unfolds according to rules
that differ from the syntax of finite systems of signs” (295). Alloa’s searching for-
mulations late in his remarkable book recall another tradition that, it bears recalling,
had been unfolding alongside the philosophical narrative so expertly, if selectively,
traced in this study. Comprising a starkly different cast of characters, from Maximus
the Confessor, John of Damascus, Nikephoros, Photius, Nicholas of Cusa, Goethe
and Ruskin all the way to Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean-Luc Marion, Marie-José
Mondzain, and Jean-Louis Chrétien in our time, this counter-genealogy – theist in
the main and evidently free of the anti-metaphysical neuralgia exhibited by most con-
temporary thought – often chimes remarkably well with Alloa’s project of a medial
phenomenology. Hence, if the history of (early) modern philosophy is indeed for the
most part a “ghost story” of the diaphanous image, we ought to recall that alternative
genealogy, being one more blindspot of modern philosophy’s “medial forgetfulness”
(Medienvergessenheit). Rather than compartmentalizing the two narratives, Alloa’s
study can be read as making an implicit case for their dialectical integration, a pos-
sibility he himself has raised elsewhere and that merits further investigation.1

1
See Alloa’s fine essay “Visual Studies in Byzantium: a Pictorial Turn avant la letter. Journal of Visual
Culture 12:1 (2013): pp. 3–29.

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